Audrey Hepburn was arguably one of the biggest icons of the 20th century. She was a beautiful and talented actress who shot to stardom in 1953 with the movie “Roman Holiday,” an ascent so at odds with her former reality of surviving on turnips and boiled tulip bulbs during the grueling years of Nazi-occupied Holland not even 10 years prior. The actress would go on to have an enduring love affair with the city of Rome, seamlessly integrating herself into its social fabric.
Hepburn’s son, Luca Dotti, preserves his mother’s life in Rome in “Audrey in Rome,” a book published in 2011 that provides hundreds of intimate and candid photographs of the star in the Italian capital. In 2013, in an essay for Vanity Fair titled “My Fair Mother,” he sheds more light on the nearly 30-year-old love affair the actress had with the Eternal City. It is a study of Hepburn as a woman, a mother, and an adopted Roman, rather than a portrait of her intense career. His introductory paragraph perhaps best captures Hepburn's essence – a Hollywood star who was not born Roman but became it in spirit.
“A short time ago, while letting me off by my doorstep in Rome, a taxi driver said to me, “I know this place. Years ago I used to bring a beautiful woman here.” That woman was my mother, Audrey Hepburn, but with the strange grace Romans can so unexpectedly display, he refrained from naming her. During the nearly 20 years in which Mother lived here, many people in Rome knew her the way that taxi driver did: as a woman who was fond of taking her children to school and of going on long walks with her dogs. Sometimes these private moments were captured when a photographer happened upon her as she stood on a side street near Campo de’ Fiori with her husband, waiting for her mother-in-law to buzz them in for Sunday lunch.”
In 1953, Hepburn starred in “Roman Holiday,” a movie that immortalized her and the Vesper as symbols of la dolce vita. In 1955, she returned to film “War and Peace,” at Cinecittà. By the 1960s, Hepburn had moved to Rome, where she lived first in the center before moving to Parioli, an elegant quarter of the city. In Rome, Hepburn took her son to the park and to swimming lessons and met with his school teachers. She took her dogs for walks, navigated the city’s grocery stores, and cooked her favorite dish: spaghetti al pomodoro.
Her life in Rome was, by all means, normal. The city and its people were fond of her, and let her be, for the most part. She was part of its society until she left in the mid-1980s, moving to Switzerland where she eventually died in 1993. And while the world may remember her as a glamorous Oscar-winning icon, Romans remember her as one of them.
Asia London Palomba
Asia London Palomba is a trilingual freelance journalist from Rome, Italy. In the past, her work on culture, travel, and history has been published in The Boston Globe, Atlas Obscura, The Christian Science Monitor, and Grub Street, New York Magazine's food section. In her free time, Asia enjoys traveling home to Italy to spend time with family and friends, drinking Hugo Spritzes, and making her nonna's homemade cavatelli.